Abstract:

With the rapid economic development during the last 30 years in China, more and more disparities have emerged among different regions. It has been one of the hot topics in the fields of physical geography and economic geography, and also has been the task for Chinese government to handle. Nevertheless, to quantitatively assess the impacts of physio-geographical patterns (PGP) on the regional development disparity has been ignored for a long time. In this paper, a quantitative method was adopted to assess the marginal ef-fects of the PGP on spatio-temporal disparity using the partial determination coefficients. The paper described the construction of the evaluation model step by step following its key scien-tific thinking. Total GDP, per capita GDP, primary industrial output value and secondary in-dustrial output value were employed in this study as the indicators to reflect the impacts of PGP on the regional development disparity. Based on the evaluation methods built by re-searchers, this study firstly analyzed the temporal impacts of the PGP on spatio-temporal disparity of the regional development in China during the past 50 years, and then explained the spatial differences at each development stage. The results show that the spatio-temporal disparity in China is highly related to the PGP, and that the marginal contribution rate could be employed as an effective way to quantitatively assess the impact of the PGP on spa-tio-temporal disparity of the regional development.

Key words: physio-geographical pattern, regional development, spatio-temporal disparity, marginal contribution rate